“La Loma del Pliegue Tumbado” (17.85 km with 1,070m+) had been on my mind for a long time. Erin Ton, from Colorado, USA, did it the day before we left for our trip to Argentina. I was happy for her but frustrated that I was no longer the first to set it.
I like doing FKTs (Fastest Known Time, as the name suggests, the fastest recorded time on a specific mountain segment, verified by the website www.fastestknowntime.com) "onsight" (a term from rock climbing where you attempt a route you’ve never seen before, to test how good you are on your first try). So now, Erin had set a round-trip record, and we were facing the challenge of trying to break it. We knew she had reached the summit in 1:15 and returned to the base in 2:04.
Since trail running in an FKT format on non-technical terrain isn’t really our thing, we had no idea if we could beat those numbers. We went in scared, super nervous. Pushing as if our lives depended on it, I pulled Chris up in a carnival of snot, my nose bursting with blood (which had never happened to me before), and we reached the summit in 1:07 and some seconds. Shouts, video recordings—and now we had to descend.
Now it was Chris’s turn to pull me, and at the limit of my ability, we reached the base in 1:49:36 (a little less, because in the excitement of hugging, I forgot to stop the watch...).
We did it. The relief was overwhelming. We were filled with anxiety about whether we could pull off something decent after months of preparation. I didn’t want to disappoint Chris or myself if we failed to break the record. The fear of failure loomed over us, knowing we’d have to deal with it the next day and carry that weight into the next project, Cerro Madsen via El Pilar as one of the biggest goals of the trip. Chris will load this other FKT.
Comments
I tried to mention this to Tito over strava but this is not the record.
The actual route goes to the summit and back, they went to the 'lookout' below the summit.
The men's time for the real summit is something like 1:43 according to strava segments.